Duncan Dallas - obituary

Duncan Dallas was the founder of Café Scientifique soirées which mixed drinks
and Darwinism

Duncan Dallas

6:39PM BST 29 Apr 2014

Duncan Dallas, who has died aged 73, was a former television producer who founded the first Café Scientifique, with the aim of opening up to discussion by the non-scientific community areas previously colonised by boffins.

As head of Yorkshire Television’s science unit, Dallas was responsible for such series as Where There’s Life, with Miriam Stoppard and Rob Buckman; and Don’t Ask Me, which made celebrities of David Bellamy and Magnus Pike. However, his career took a different turn in 1998 after he read an obituary of Marc Sautet, the founder of Café Philosophique, who sought to bring philosophy to the French public with regular two-hour discussions over croissants and coffee.

Amazed to discover that 80 cafés had become part of the network, Dallas wondered whether something similar might work on this side of the Channel — though he reasoned that Anglo-Saxons would probably be happier discussing science than the meaning of life.

Looking out of his office window in Leeds, Dallas’s attention was caught by a wine bar which held regular poetry evenings. The bar was closed on Mondays, so he suggested to its proprietor that he open it once a fortnight for informal meetings with scientists.

The first Science Café was held in May 1998, when Anthony O’Hear gave a talk on Darwinism. To Dallas’s surprise some 40 people turned up, and afterwards a collection was taken — in “le Chapeau Scientifique” — to pay O’Hear’s modest expenses. The meetings soon established a pattern, with invited figures giving a short talk to “focus the discussion” before the floor was thrown open to all comers — all while enjoying a drink and a night out.

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As word of Dallas’s initiative spread, new groups sprang up around the country and then across the world, attracting funding from institutions such as the Royal Society, the Wellcome Trust, universities and the British Council. “For me,” Dallas said, “the whole point of science cafés isn’t to promote science... but is about everyone being able to discuss topics which are revolutionary.”

The issues covered ranged from robotics to climate change, and from the science of sleep to the feminist perspective on Darwinism. But Dallas found there were some no-go areas. “I’m afraid it’s no good having a lecture on mechanical engineering,” he observed ruefully. “You have to pick something that’s intrinsically a little bit sexy.”

An only child, Duncan Munro Dallas was born in Elgin, Morayshire, on October 27 1940. After reading Chemistry at Balliol College, Oxford, he joined the BBC as a graduate trainee, cutting his directorial teeth on the Man Alive current affairs series. In 1968 he was headhunted to work in the documentary unit at the newly-formed Yorkshire Television in Leeds.

A year after he joined, It Never Seemed to Rain (inspired by his own memories of childhood holidays in Scarborough), a nostalgia-fest replete with Pierrot shows, old-fashioned bathing machines, big hats and parasols, won Dallas a Bafta nomination. This was followed by a period working with Alan Whicker in Australia before he was appointed head of YTV’s science output.

In 1973 Dallas produced Awakenings, a documentary which focused on some of the survivors of the “sleeping sickness” epidemic of the early 1920s, patients brought to — temporary — life by Oliver Sacks, who told the story in a book of the same name. The story would famously be made into a film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams; but Dallas’s sensitive editing of hospital tapes and his own footage, showing patients emerging from frozen lifelessness to lively individuality before inexorably returning to their former state as the drugs ceased to work, was far more affecting and devastating.

After leaving Yorkshire Television in the 1990s, Dallas set up an independent production company.

In 1966 Duncan Dallas married Gloden Horbury. The marriage was later dissolved, and he married secondly, in 1984, Elizabeth Bryce, who died in 2011. He is survived by a son and daughter of his first marriage and by two sons of his second.